A shrunken social safety net. Flight delays. And more missed paychecks. The effects of the government shutdown may have been slow to take hold, but they are about to burst into the open as federal dollars start drying up for key programs.
Three key thoughts on this:
Number one: Here’s what to know about the cascading deadlines of the next few days.
Hundreds of thousands of federal employees—including the country’s 14,000 air traffic controllers—missed their first full paycheck on Tuesday. Other workers will either miss a full paycheck on Thursday or already did the previous Friday, October 24. In total, around 1.4 million civilian federal employees are going unpaid during the shutdown. About 730,000 of them are continuing to work; the other 670,000 are furloughed.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, is set to start running out of funding on Saturday. Almost 42 million Americans rely on SNAP, receiving an average of $187.20 per month to pay for groceries.
